World of Reuse

13th International Software Product Line Conference (SPLC)

noreply@blogger.com (Paulo Silveira) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:12:00 +0000

Now in its 13th year, the International Software Product Line Conference (SPLC) 2009 was held August 24 – 28 in San Francisco, California. In this edition, the presence of industrial and academy people was remarkable, resulting in more than 150 attendees. Practitioners and researchers from different countries had the opportunity to discuss hot topics regarding to Software Product Lines area.

During the first two days, current SPL topics were discussed through different workshops and tutorials. Some workshops were realized at the first time, which indicates the emergence of new hot topics, indicating the need of investigation and study. For example, 1st workshop on consolidating community consensus in product line practice, which counter with the presence of different companies (SEI, BigLever, Yahoo, IBM), and 1st international workshop on Model-Driven Approaches in Software Product Line Engineering. Although the workshop on Dynamic Software Product Lines (DSPL) is in the third edition, this edition was marked by the research and practitioners discussion that did not achieved a consensus regarding to the concept of dynamic SPL, which highlights the lack of maturity in this field. They were discussing the difference between Dynamic SPLs and Single systems, since to dynamically change the code the software needs to be completely developed and integrated. The workshop Scalable Mod eling Techniques for Software Product Lines (SCALE 2009 ), have Tomoki Kishi and Kyo Kang, and they start showing the problems when modeling scalable systems, for example, size, complexity, distributed environment, long life cycle and multiple stakeholders. In SPL context the main problems are variability management, configuration management, model based development and complicated development style. Later, the Service-Oriented Architectures and Software Product Lines (SOAPL) which was marked with the presence of the RiSE group represented by Flavio Medeiros, presenting the paper entitled "Towards an Approach for Service-Oriented Product Line Architectures".

On Wednesday, the first keynote speaker, Richard Gabriel from IBM discuss the about "Science is Not Enough: On Creation of Software", which presented a different perspective in the field. His talk was a mix between a talk and lecture including the strong relationship with arts. During this day, papers regarding to configuration, scoping and variability were presented and discussed.

On Thursday, the second keynote speaker, Jacob G. Refstrup - lead architect for the Owen software product line architecture from HP - which is used across multiple inkjet product families. He talked about "Adapting to Change: Architecture, Processes and Tools: a closer look at HP's Experience in Evolving the Owen Software Product Line".

On Friday, the last keynote speaker, Kyo Chul Kang presents the "FODA: Twenty Years ofk for feature analysis and simple but comprehensive way to modeling commonalities and variabilities. He also report the remaining problems of it, for example, addressing other parts of the life cycle (especially application engineering), clear the mapping between Perspective on Feature Models". Kyo shows that FODA has approximately 1300 citations, highlighting the importance of it. He presents as main contributions of FODA: systematic domain analysis, lying the groundworfeatures and software artifacts, standardization of feature model extensions, trade-offs between expressiveness and simplicity, scalability of feature model, managing complexity in view of many inter-dependent features, feature model evaluation and integration with UML model.

During this day the Goldfish Panel "How to Maximize Business Return of Software Product Line Development", had the presence of the most renowned researchers in the area as John D. McGregor, Dirk Murthig, David M. Weiss, Klaus Smith, Jan Bosch, Charles Krueger and Eduardo Almeida, which put in discussion the Brazilians company reality, reporting that they have not a specific domain and asking how is the best way to introduce the SPL approach in these companies. Others issues to think about were discussed as: Is it worthwhile at all?, What are the three top-most value-generating activities?, How to recognize where to focus efforts? (subsystem, functionality,..) and What was your worst ever product line experience?

Finally, the waiting hall of fame was presented by David Weiss showing the results of the evaluation from 2008 and presented the candidates for 2009. Two new companies were trying to have her names in the hall of fame, the TomTom company presents a GPS software product line and Lockeed Martin . In the end, the TomTom was nominated and will be evaluated during this year. The results will be available in the next SPLC 2010 held in Korea.

35th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications

yguarata@gmail.com (Yguaratã C. Cavalcanti) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:51:00 +0000

On last week, between 27-29 August, it was run the 12th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD) and the 35th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA) 2009.

Both conferences took place at the Cultural and Conference Center, in the University of Patras. The event put togther research from various places of the world. All of them interested in discussing new ideas, such work in progress, and concluded work. The RiSE group was represented by Yguaratã Cerqueira Cavalcanti, in the SEAA 2009 sessions, where he presented three works from the group, as follows:

1 - Martins, A. C; Garcia, V. C.; Almeida, E. S.; Meira, S. R. L. Suggesting Software Components for Reuse in Search Engines Using Discovered Knowledge Techniques, 35th IEEE EUROMICRO Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA), Service and Component Based Software Engineering (SCBSE) Track, Patras, Greece, 2009.

2 - Neiva, D. F. S; Almeida, E. S.; Meira, S. R. L. An Experimental Study on Requirements Engineering for Software Product Lines, 35th IEEE EUROMICRO Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA), Service and Component Based Software Engineering (SCBSE) Track, Short Paper, Patras, Greece, 2009.

3 - Silva, F. R. C; Almeida, E. S.; Meira, S. R. L. A Component Testing Approach Supported by a CASE Tool, 35th IEEE EUROMICRO Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA), Service and Component Based Software Engineering (SCBSE) Track, Short Paper, Patras, Greece, 2009.

The paper "A Component Testing Approach Supported by a CASE Tool" was presented in the SCBSE: Component-based Systems Correctness and Test session. In conjunction with this work, several other articles were presented , showing really interesting approaches.

The paper "Suggesting Software Components for Reuse in Search Engines Using Discovered Knowledge Techniques" was presented in the session SCBSE: Experiences and Applications. And th paper "An Experimental Study on Requirements Engineering for Software Product Lines" was showed in the session SPPI: Empirical Approaches.

All the work presented were very interesting. People showed a lot of new ideas to solve the most well know problems regarding SCBSE, and the importance of the empirical approaches session should be emphasized, since there is a lack of well made empirical validation in most of CS work.

Oh, we had also a very amazing gala dinner organized by the Euromicro committee, in front of a very beautiful beach. There we could taste really nice Greek food, and it was also possible to see some Greek dance and to listen Greek music. Really nice!!!

The next Euromicro will take place on Lilly, France. I hope to see you there.

RiSE’s Interviews: Episode 6 – Software Reuse with Dr. John D. McGregor

noreply@blogger.com (Eduardo Almeida) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:48:00 +0000

After the 4th Workshop to Introduce Reuse in Enterprises (WIRE), in Recife. An interview was performed with John D. McGregor an associate professor of computer science at Clemson University, a founding partner of Luminary Software, and a Visiting Scientist at Software Engineering Institute (SEI).

This interview is available here.

I would like to thank McGregor for accepted the podcast invitation, and inform that was a very nice experience and a pleasure, interview a person with this importance for the research community.

1) Talk a little bit about your career, how do you initiated, your graduation and their relationship with industry. I would like to know about your experiences and the work at the university and industry, your challenges as a reuse practitioner and after in the industry and how as the road to be there because it is a incredible career.

2) You worked a lot with software architecture and software product lines. For you, what is the importance of the industry in the field?

3) In the software product line area, we can see the community increasing. In the last year, during SPLC, we had more than 200 participants and too many from the industry. In your opinion what are the ingredients for this success in this conference?

4) For you, is there difference between domain engineering and software product lines?

5) You had/have many projects with the industry. What are the main problems to introduce software product lines in companies? What are the risks and how to avoid them? Finally, how to define a road to start it in companies?

6) Some companies believe that software product lines can be a good approach to obtain benefits related to time-to-market cost reduction, etc. However, we do not have many specific models to show the risks, the benefits, economic models etc. So, how to show for companies that a software product lines approach can be good?

7) You had many industrial projects in the software product lines area. For you, what were the strong, weak points and main lessons learned?

8) How to introduce software product lines in a software factory working with different domains?

9) We can see in the reuse field, ideas like: modules, objects, components, software product lines, and others ones such as models, services, DSLs. For you what can be the next one?

10) For you what is the state of the practice in the area and the directions for future research?

* This interview was performed by Paulo Anselmo from RiSE Labs.

IV Workshop to Introduce Reuse in Enterprises (WIRE) - Workshop Report

noreply@blogger.com (Ivan Machado) — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 18:20:00 +0000

4th WIRE, the Workshop to Introduce Reuse in Enterprises, the right place to discuss the state of the practice and exchange experiences with the most important reuse experts from Brazil and the world as well, was held at the Hotel Atlante Plaza in Recife, Brazil, in the last June 29 and 30.

The workshop attendance joined reuse practitioners from industry and academy. This year, people from 10 states in Brazil, and from European countries (Portugal, The Netherlands and Ireland) as well, comprising a set of 17 companies and 5 universities, came to the event.

Great discussions on reuse topic were performed, in which practitioners conducted a very interesting environment to discuss such a topic. This edition, WIRE were mainly concerned about the strategic reuse adoption based on Software Product Line (SPL) aspects, with the presence of important experts in this area, John D. McGregor, from Clemson University (US), presenting the tutorial Building Reusable Testing Assets for a Software Product Line and the keynote entitled Goal-driven Product Derivation; Frank van der Linden, from Philips Research (The Netherlands), with the tutorial Software Product Line engineering, the practical aspects, and a speech on Applying open source development in product line engineering; and Eduardo Almeida, from C.E.S.A.R (Brazil), presenting the topic Software Reuse Measurement: What the Experts Think about It.

Moreover, work-in-group sessions (see a picture of this activity in the left) were performed that enabled the attendance to discuss the following questions: 1) What are the main pitfalls and challenges to the SPL adoption in your company and how they can be handled? and 2) Which changes must be implemented in the organization in order to address such issues? This effort made possible to attendance to exchange experience and ideas to be applied in order to solve still opened questions regarding SPL adoption in companies.

At the end of the event it was announced that next WIRE, the 5th edition, will be held in São Paulo - Brazil. We will be pleased to receive you in a next turn in order to make our discussion even better!

In name of the organization, I would like to say thank you for the participants, lecturers, and sponsors. See you next year at WIRE!

9th RiSE Day

noreply@blogger.com (Ivan Machado) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:31:00 +0000

Next wednesday, on July 1st, right after IV WIRE(*), RiSE will promote its 9th internal workshop, the RiSE Day, an environment in which RiSE Members present their master and doctoral works, some concluded and some 'working in progress', in order to discuss and have feedback on the issues they have been devoted effort.

The 9th RiSE Day will be held at C.E.S.A.R, in Recife-PE, Brazil, at 10:00 a.m. Software reuse practitioners are welcome to make discussions more interesting!

(*) IV WIRE - Workshop to Introduce Reuse in Enterprises - is promoted by RiSE in conjunction with C.E.S.A.R and CIn, and it will be held in next June 29 and 30, 2009.

*UPDATE - Jul 1st, 2009*

This edition included the following presentations:

Towards an Approach for Service-Oriented Product Line Architectures - Lecturer: Flavio Medeiros
RiPLE-DE - The RiSE Process for Product Line Engineering Design - Lecturer: Ednaldo Dilorenzo
RiSE Adoption Process Framework for Software Reuse Adoption in Brazilian Companies - Lecturer: Vinicius Garcia
Towards an approach to deal with feature interaction in software product lines - Lecturer: Hernan Muñoz
SPL Architectures - Variability in Quality Attributes - Lecturer: Ricardo Cavalcanti
Towards an effective Software Product Line Testing Approach - Lecturers: Paulo Anselmo and Ivan Machado

The Ph.D. student Pàdraig O'Leary, from Lero, The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, came to this workshop to experience the research the RiSE group has been conducted and exchange ideas with RiSE members as well. He presented the research he's been worked on, entitled A Process Framework for Product Derivation.

We are glad for the comments and contributions from John D. McGregor and Frank van der Linden, who also joined this international RiSE Day.

Best Dissertation Award

noreply@blogger.com (Eduardo Almeida) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:52:00 +0000

In the last Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality, Fernando Raposo, member from the RiSE Labs was awarded with the best M.Sc. dissertation in the software quality area.

In his work, Fernando defined an approach for component testing and a CASE tool to automate it. Moreover, he defined an experimental study evaluating the approach and tool defined.

Congratulations, Fernando!!

31st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) - Conference Report

noreply@blogger.com (Eduardo Almeida) — Thu, 28 May 2009 22:05:00 +0000

Last week, I had the chance to participate in the 3 1st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), in Vancouver, Canada. The conference had a great program composed of research papers, demonstrations, a track related to software engineering in practice (SEIP), a track also about new ideas and emerging results (NIER) and several parallel events such as the 6th International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), the 17th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC), and the International Conference on Software Process (ICSP).

In these co-located events it is very good to see the growing of the MSR, it is incredible how it is getting attention from the community. On Monday, I spent the day hanging out the area in the morning and having some discussions with others participants. On Tuesday, it was performed the Software Requirements and Design: A Tribute to Michael Jackson, a full day workshop about his contributions in the field. The workshop was very well conducted by Pamela Zave and Bashar Nuseibeh. I believe that this kind of event it is very important to celebrate outstanding researchers working with software engineering. I had the chance to participate in previous ICSEs including the tribute to Barry Boehm. A book with his work similar to Barry Boehm, David Parnas and Vic Basili will be released soon.

On Wednesday, the conference started. The first keynote was Steve McConnell and his talk about: “10 Most Powerful Ideas in Software Engineering”. His presentation was interesting, especially, when he pointed out some ideas with a gauge showing the silly state of each one. His final list was:

1. Software Development Work is Performed by Human Beings.
2. Incrementalism.
3. Iteration.
4. Cost to Fix A Defect Increases Over Time.
5. Important Kernel of Truth in the Waterfall Model.
6. Software Estimation Can be Improved Over Time.
7. The Most Powerful Form of Reuse is Full Reuse.
8. Risk Management Provides Critical Insights into Many Core Software Development Issues. 9. Different Kinds of Software Call for Different Kinds of Software Development.
10. SWEBOK.

After Steve’s talk started the research papers and I had to run and switch among different rooms and sessions. In this day, I decided to see the following papers:

Tesseract: Interactive Visual Exploration of Socio-Technical Relationships in Software Development; and
Succession: Measuring Transfer of Code and Developer Productivity.

Next, I participated in NIER session with interesting new ideas and the SCORE competition by student teams. In this competition, Brazil was there with a team from UFPE, congrats, guys and Prof. Jaelson Castro their coach! In the end of the day, we had a small dinner with the conference members. It was good to talk a little bit more and meet others students and professors from Brazilian universities.

On Thursday, Carlo Ghezzi was the second keynote speaker with the theme: “Reflections on Forty-Plus Years of Software Engineering Researched Observed Through ICSE: An Insider’s View”. His presentation was very good with several data, charts, discussing what we produced, how to measure it, lessons learned and how to improve our current scenario. It was awesome!!

After that, I started to switch again among several presentations and I ended up with the following list:

Reasoning About Edits to Feature Models
How We Refactor, and How We Know It (Winner of ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Papers Award)
The Secret Life of Bugs: Going Past the Errors and Omissions in Software Repositories
Discovering and Representing Systematic Code Changes.

Still in this day, we had discussion about Software Engineering for the Planet and Reflecting on Development Processes in the Video Game Industry. Finally, the paper N Degrees of Separation: Multi-Dimensional Separation of Concerns was presented and won the the most influential paper award.

On Friday, Pamela Zave was the last keynote and presented Software Engineering for the Next Internet. After Pamela’s talk, I participated in a session on Multicore Software Engineering and saw some challenges in the area and other papers such as:

Does Distributed Development Affect Software Quality? An Empirical Case Study of Windows Vista (Winner of ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Papers Award); and
How to Avoid Drastic Software Process Change (using Stochastic Stability), and
Do Code Clones Matter?.

It was the report about this ICSE.

Next year, see you in South Africa.

P.S: I did not see the keynote presentations on the website. However, all the keynotes sent me it after my request. So, try it too.

World of Reuse is open for Software Reuse experts

noreply@blogger.com (Eduardo Almeida) — Fri, 08 May 2009 01:53:00 +0000

After several discussions with RiSE members, we decided to open the World of Reuse blog for the reuse community. As its name, this blog will be the world of reuse as a free place for any software reuse expert presents its ideas, experiences, and insigiths about it.

Thus, join us, request your login and let's build a strong forum for the reuse community.

Scoping in Agile Software Product Lines

marcelabalbinosm@gmail.com (Marcela Balbino) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:56:00 +0000

Agiles methods and Software Product Lines (SPL) present similar benefits, both proven increasing customer satisfaction and productivity and decreasing time to market. Comparing the two process we can identify values and principles of agile methods which can be supported by SPL.

In context of SPL scoping the majority difficulty to join SPL and agile methods is related at the agile value “working software over comprehensive documentation”, because in SPL the planning is model-driven and vast documentation is required. However, in general, the other agile values can be used in the SPL scoping phase. The agile value ‘‘individuals and interactions over processes and tools” require experience and knowledge of the technical and business stakeholders and efetive communication between them, according to [Carbon et. al., 2006] this activa communication can bring the following benefits: I. The reuse rate can be increased. FE gets information on newly requested features early in an AE project and can evolve the product line assets proactively. Thus, in upcoming iterations AE can build upon the “right” reusable assets; and II. Redundant implementations of product specifics in several AE projects can be reduced. FE developers participate in planning games of all AE projects and thus can coordinate the work done in parallel in the AE projects. The value “customer collaboration over contract negotiation” is interessant to SPL because can help in the customers needs real identification. The value “responding to change over following a plan” can be achieved by adoption of a planning process with flexible execution.

Beyond of the values, agile methods have some principles which can be integrated at SPL in the phase of scoping. With relation at the principle “welcome changes”, the SPL scope can be opened the changes, in [Muhammad et. al., 2008] SPL planning and core asset development can, and in fact often are, conducted in an iterative manner. The principle “communication face to face” can be achieved with workshops or brainstorms, this meeting can help in the features identification in beginning of the scope definition. The principle ‘‘build project around motivated individuals” is related with the choice of representatives stakeholders to the scoping process with roles well-defined.

However, is difficult to combine SPL practices with agile methods and the researches in the area are recent. Therefore, will be possible define a agile scoping approach well-defined and of the relevancy to the industrial scenario?

IEEE Software - Top List

noreply@blogger.com (Eduardo Almeida) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 02:28:00 +0000

"From its start in 1984 through 2008, IEEE Software published more than 1,200 peer-reviewed articles".

In order to celebrate 25 years of publication, they prepared a very nice list of 35 highly recommended articles based on several issues of software development. I read some of them but sure I will do the full list.

The list is here. Enjoy and spread this very useful knowledge in any project.

Revisiting Parnas: On the Design and Development of Program Families

noreply@blogger.com (Ricardo Cavalcanti) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 12:51:00 +0000

The paper presents a comparison between techniques to develop program families. “Stepwise refinement”, introduced by Dijkstra, tries to develop programs through the use of informal, intermediate representations of programs that are then refined. The refinement introduces the design decisions by implementing the informal program in actual languages.

The technique introduced by Parnas is called “Module Specification”. In this technique, the intermediate stages are specifications of behavior that is “encapsulated” into modules. He asserts that this approach leads to decrease the final cost of producing the software as the modularization helps to deal with complexity. Also, the use of modules and specifications helps to postpone design decisions, particularly those that will differentiate family members.

Sometimes, Parnas focus seems to be only to broaden the family possibility, in other words, increase the amount of variation points. This occurs specially at the beginning of the process. His strategy aims in making the design to enable the postponement of the decisions. In some sense, he puts the focus of a software family as it was to have as many members as possible.

Although the use of information hiding to postpone design decisions points is an excellent way to create variation points, leading to the Strategy design pattern, I think it should be used with care because it could lead to overgeneralization of the modules. Modules that are unlikely to change or vary may have to carry the complexity needed to implement the improbable variation. Maybe, this occurs only at early stages in the process.

The most interesting point is that the author starts thinking about planning before developing a program family. He also gives importance to the order in which the design decisions are made. This suggests that an approach for software families should choose the degree of importance of each aspect and characteristic so that the resulting program addresses its purposes properly.

Revisiting Parnas: The influence of software structure on reliability

noreply@blogger.com (Ricardo Cavalcanti) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 01:36:00 +0000

Here, Parnas steps aside from software correctness and formal proof of programs and discusses another problem: Is a program that outputs correct useful if we cannot rely on it when we demand?

He introduces the term Reliability “a measure of the extent to which the system can be expected to deliver usable services when those services are demanded”. In other words, a system is considered to be highly reliable, if it is highly probable that, when we demand a service from the system, it will perform to our satisfaction.

Software structure may harm reliability when build upon the wrong assumption that nothing can go wrong. Parnas consider some situations that can influence reliability, among them the influence of external dependencies and the correctness of the software itself.

The author explains that the error detection and handling mechanism is often neglected or poorly done. It is important that the interface between modules enable communication about errors as well. The means to express this possibility of errors between interrelated modules seems to be well solved, e.g., by Exceptions and try-catch blocks in modern languages such as Java. Still, the way to use them correctly is easily overlooked.

Nowadays, software architecture studies contemplate a whole bunch of other attributes of software architectures. Yet, the influence of software structure on reliability is still a hot topic in software architecture. And although some of the early questions can be answered, new ones arrive.

Revisiting Parnas: Use of the concept of transparency in the design of hierarchically structured systems

noreply@blogger.com (Ricardo Cavalcanti) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 23:44:00 +0000

In year 1975, Parnas publishes with D.P. Siewiorek “Use of the Concept of Transparency in the Design of Hierarchically Structured Systems”. The publication talks about the difficulties in using an Outside In (aka Top down) approach to design and develop software. The main point discussed in the piece is the cost of using abstraction in software constructions.

For the authors, the use of abstractions is an excellent way to make big systems understandable as a whole, as higher level abstractions hide the inner workings of a piece of software. The approach that starts from the outside in can have some difficulties, however. (1) The difficulty to obtain a good specification of the “outside” and (2) even harder to express it without implying internal design decisions, (3) the derivation from such a specification is frequently not feasible, (4) inner details of the implementation can already be fixed, such as hardware or an operating system.

The term Transparency is then discussed. Considering a two level system, say a lower, hardware level and a higher, control software level. Transparency is the measure of how much of a lower level capability is available at a higher level. Complete transparency means that if it is feasible in a lower level tier, it should be feasible in an upper level tier. When a design decision restricts the possibilities of a lower level tier when used through an upper level tier, there is a loss of transparency. For instance, if our Data Access Object layer only permits data selection from the database, there is clearly a loss of transparency as the ability to insert and delete data was suppressed.

Complete transparency is not always a good thing. There is a trade-off between transparency and flexibility of a design. The increase of transparency between two levels can lead to great implementation difficulties and inefficiencies. The designer should be aware and ponder. As stated: “Loss of transparency is often one of the goals of a design”.

Concluding on the difficulties with the outside in approach, the authors affirm that usually the design comprises many inter-related objects. Moreover, there is limited experience with man-man symbiosis, so it is often impossible to specify the outside before construction and not want to change it afterwards.

I would say that we still have limited experience with human-human symbiosis, what one could name as managerial issues in software development. Also, there usually is a lack of engineering expertise, where software designers and developers forget about key principles stated decades ago.

Revisiting Parnas: On the Criteria to be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules

noreply@blogger.com (Flavio Medeiros) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:58:00 +0000

In the paper called "On the Criteria to be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules", from 1972*, David L. Parnas discusses modularization as a mechanism for improving flexibility and comprehensibility of a system. David Parnas also emphasizes the shortening of development time because each module can be developed by separate groups. The main point of the paper is the introduction of some criteria that can be used to decompose systems into modules.

A comparison of two different ways to decompose a system is presented. The former decomposition is based on a flowchart, which makes each major part of a process as a module. This kind of decomposition can bring some problems such as:

• Changeability: changes to a specific module require modification of other modules;
• Understandability and Independent Development: modules cannot be understandable or even developed separately.

The second decomposition presented is based on the principles of information hiding, and normally solves the problems listed above. In this case, the modules no longer correspond to steps in the process; each module is characterized by its knowledge of a design decision which it hides from the others. It is also emphasized that the modules’ interfaces must reveal as little as possible about its inner workings.

The design by contract is also commented in the paper, Parnas mentioned that the inputs and outputs of each module must be well defined before implementation starts, what is obvious currently.

In a subsequent post, the remarkable “Uses of the Concept of Transparency in the Design of Hierarchically Structured Systems” shall be discussed.

Revisiting Parnas: A Technique for Software Module Specification with Examples

noreply@blogger.com (Ricardo Cavalcanti) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:55:00 +0000

During this month, in a series of posts we shall revisit the works from David L. Parnas. The exploration will concentrate itself in particular on the publication concerning software architecture and design, from 1970 to 2000.

In the paper called “A Technique for Software Module Specification with Examples”, from 1972*, Parnas introduces a way to specify software pieces. His ideas could be considered the early stages of Bertrand Meyer’s, Design By Contract. The technique is based on formal description of initial possible values and its types, parameters and effects.

The effects session also describes errors states in which an error handling routine will be called, even though the error handling routine itself is not described by the specification. This is very well argued by Parnas and totally coherent for me: errors can be handled differently in many levels and should be a concern for the user of the function.

The main point of the article, is not the notation itself, but the set of principles upon which it was build. Those principles state for (1) the need of a concise specification for the function’s user and for the implementer. (2) It promotes Information Hiding by stating that no information about the structure calling program should be conveyed. The principles are also in favor of (3) a more formal specification that can possibly be machine tested. Finally, (4) it encourages the use of a Domain Language for the specification.

The set of four principles define succinctly the main characteristic any software specification technique should have. I see the use of formal methods as a weak point, when it comes to certain contexts of development, such as large information systems, where the formal specification could be worthy only in small chunks of the system. On the other hand, I think the machine testability should gain more focus nowadays, as AOP and unit testing techniques and frameworks are so widespread.

In a subsequent post, the remarkable “On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules” shall be discussed. ‘Till then.

*There is an earlier paper, from 1971, entitled “Information Distribution aspects of design Methodology”, but it wasn’t possible to retrieve it from the available internet academic databases.

A brief dive into Variability Testing

noreply@blogger.com (Ivan Machado) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 19:29:00 +0000

With the growth of applications complexity, the amount of variation points and the number of possible combinations among them can be considered as a problem to be concerned with, specially surrounding the creation of test assets that handle many variations. This context depicts a tradeoff between testability and the number of variabilities a product line contains.
In this context, we have just finished a systematic review on Software Product Line Testing (SPLT) which covers, among many other issues regarding this interesting research topic, variability testing concerns.

It is worthwhile to mention this aspect has been gained special attention among the SPLT researchers since this is not a very mature topic with many "open questions" to be addressed.
Following we illustrate the summary of important studies we have collected on this topic, presenting the effort devoted to solve this problem.

One proposes a solution, the cumulative variability coverage which accumulates coverage information across a series of product line instance development activities, to be further exploited in a target testing activities for product line instances. In another solution, constraints are placed into the product line architecture. Instead of having components with large amount of variability, for testability improvement commonalities and variabilities must be separated and the variabilities must be encapsulated into subcomponents. The objective is to reduce the retest of components and products when modifications are made so that independence of feature and components as well as the reduction of side effects are important. Other proposes to establish a coherent traceability from requirements to implementation and test assets. There are some ways to achieve this traceability between test assets and implementation, where the mechanism used in the product to implement the variation can be appropriate for implementing the test software for that portion of the software.

Furthermore, our intention regards to figure out how the SPLT approaches tackle variability along the software lifecycle, even though we have not gained answer to this question yet by reading and analyzing these and other studies. This can indeed be an extra research question to be addressed in future work!

A case study on technologies to implement variability in service-oriented product lines

noreply@blogger.com (Heberth Braga) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:55:00 +0000

In the course I.N.1.1.7.4 - Advanced Seminars in Software Reuse at CIN/UFPE was presented a case study definition on technologies to implement variability in service-oriented technologies. This post briefly describes the case study definition and some issues founded during the study.

Software Product Line (SPL) and Service-Oriented Architecture(SOA) emerge as two powerful concepts and their combination is a new research area. The combination of these two concepts is expected to become a new development paradigm maximizing reuse and business integration. In order to include services in a product line, developers could include variation points in the architecture implemented as a component or as a service as mentioned in the SOAPL 2007.

Thus, the goal of this case study is to identify the most suitable technology to implement variability in the context of service-oriented product lines. From this perspective, this case study will evaluate service-oriented technologies (OSGi and Web Services) and non-service-oriented technologies (XVCL) through a comparison between the technologies. In conjunction with the technologies, some variability mechanisms are applied to handle the variations in the source code.

Our contribution is that with this evaluation, we can select a technology that will help software engineers or researchers to integrate the technology with guidelines and criteria support in their organization or academic research.

However, some issues remain interesting for discussion:

1. OSGi can be considered as a service-oriented technology?

- The current release of OSGI stated that this technology incorporate interoperability of applications and services based on its component integration platform. However, this the concept of interoperability is not clear, because the OSGi is specific to Java.

2. It is possible combine OSGi and Web Services to solve the first issue?

3. Is it interesting to analyze these two technologies separately or the combination between them?

Feature Interaction in Software Product Lines

noreply@blogger.com (Hernan) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 20:42:00 +0000

Software product lines (SPL) is considered a key approach for companies interested in improving software development increasing their productivity, quality and reducing costs. In SPL, features define commonalities and variabilities of the products, but they are not independent from each other, since there are interactions among them. These interactions among features can occur in unexpected ways causing impact in a SPL, affecting, for example, the reusable assets.

In this way, conflicts in most of the cases can be dealed during domain analysis phase through a management of feature dependencies. A feature dependency model represents not only static dependencies, but it also represents dynamic relationships and behavior characteristics among features. Additionally, it helps to trace the dependencies and how to configure the products member in a SPL.

Thus, due to the importance to solve this problem in a SPL environment, a systematic review was made to investigate approaches that proposed a solution for this. The main goal of the review was to identify how to classify and represent these dependencies and the guidelines used to identify the interactions to better understand a solution to avoid this problem.

However, some questions remain interesting for discursion: How identify feature interaction in a domain analysis? What activities are necessary? Is it interesting to have standardization on classification of feature interaction to support the dependencies identification among features?

Service-Oriented Product Line

noreply@blogger.com (Flavio Medeiros) — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 18:47:00 +0000

This post describes important issues related to service-oriented analysis and design that were identified with a systematic review on the area and also present our future work related to combining service-oriented architecture and software product line. This research is being performed at Cin/UFPE.

The aim of the systematic review was to analyze the existing service-oriented analysis and design approaches with the objective of understand and summarize evidences about analysis and design discipline, identify activities, key points, drawbacks and gaps.

After analyze the existing approaches, we could identify some gaps such as a lack of architecture documentation and concerns with reusability and other quality attributes. We also detected common activities such as service identification from business process and legacy applications, create a service inventory blueprint, service and components specification and realization strategy selection such as wrapper or develop a new service from scratch.

With the systematic review on service-oriented analysis and design approaches concluded and the problems identified on the existing service-oriented approach, together with a systematic review on domain design approaches, a software product line design process, David Parnas’ ideas and based on Attribute Driven Development, our mission is to develop an approach for service-oriented product line.

Service-oriented architecture and software product line share a common goal, both concepts focus on reusability which brings productivity gains, decreased development costs, reduce time to market, higher reliability, and competitive advantage [Soa and Spl conference].

SOA and SPL also need a well defined process to be adopted and reduce its risks as stated by Thomas Erl and Klaus Pohl. This is the main motivation for our research that intends to develop a unified process for service-oriented architecture and software product line.

However, some questions remain interesting for discursion: How to combine service-oriented architecture and software product line? How can components be substituted by services in software product line context? How to consider different organizations with its own business processes to develop a service-oriented architecture as a product regarding variability?

Scoping on Software Product Lines

marcelabalbinosm@gmail.com (Marcela Balbino) — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:28:00 +0000

In the course I.N.1.1.7.4 - Advanced Seminars in Software Reuse at CIN was achieved a research about current status on Software Product Lines (SPL) Scope, phase of SPL planning, related with the identification of the costs and viability of the product line. For one that is not familiar with the theme this text can be interesting.

The research consisted of a systematic review whose objective was to review the software product lines approaches to identify, compare and summarize evidence about the Scope Definition Techniques. The research questions investigated in this review were related with the identification of the activities, scope types, stakeholders, strengths, drawbacks, and the use of metrics for scoping definition.

With the analysis we identify that metrics definition is the problematic aspect of the approaches, where only the papers of Klaus Schmid, Isabel Jhon and Shin Young Park cite metrics for scoping in its studies. Schmid utilize techniques of business objectives operationalization based in GQM, Jhon define characterization metrics and Park uses metrics of cost to analyze economical value for the core assets.

After of the analysis a idea was questioned, what the viability of relate scope techniques for SPL with agiles development methodologies? and what scope techniques are most appropriate with agiles methodologies?

2nd RiSS - RiSE Summer School

noreply@blogger.com (Eduardo Almeida) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:13:00 +0000

In the last year, we created RiSS - RiSE Summer School on Software Reuse. The main goal of RiSS is to discuss the main software reuse issues with the main experts in the field from industry and university. In this year, we had the second edition and I believe that the summer school was very nice. In the program, a full discussion about software product lines, the main topic on the software reuse area. As lecturers, we had experts from industry and university from several countries around the world. This mix is part of the RiSS successful.

In this year, we had five lecturers, one Workshop on Software Reuse Efforts and an awesome panel with the lecturers answering questions from the attendants.

During three days, we were in front of the sea as you can see and with a full room composed of 100 people interested on the topic.
In this year, we had the award again for the best lecture and Paul Clements joined to Wayne Lim with the best presentation about product line architecture.

In name of the organization, I would like to say thank you for the participants, lecturers, and authors.

See you next time!!

One more Unforgettable RiSE Day

noreply@blogger.com (Eduardo Almeida) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 21:57:00 +0000

On November 26th, we had at C.E.S.A.R one more RiSE Day. This special workshop was composed of many discussions involving too many different issues in software reuse. In this edition, we had invited participants:Klaus Schmid, Kyo Kang, Rob Ommering, and Michalis Anastasopoulos.

The great agenda started with an overview about RiSE Labs and continued with the presentations about product lines, service-oriented product lines, bug triage and rise tools. Every year, I believe that this workshop is getting better.

Thanks for all the students and the invited participants for valuable feedback and patience.

Asset Retrieval Tools, Question Answering and Future

noreply@blogger.com (Eduardo Almeida) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:45:00 +0000

Nowadays, we are living in a world widely connected to the Internet where all users from the computer science area or not, are using search engines to find something. Different types of advances are facing these systems including song recognition and face detection. On the other hand, others relevant directions are being explored also. On July 2005, AskJeevs (ask.com) was acquired by InterActiveCorp for roughly $2.3 billions.

As you can see by the name, Ask.com is a question answer system on the web. In a paper from Communications from the ACM (CACM), Roussinov et al. discuss these systems with experimental data and interesting insights. Five years ago, I wrote a “paper” (in Portuguese) called: Common Component Market (CCM): Even your mother will want one! [you can see a draft in English here].

Nowadays, looking again from that paper, the Ask.com scenario, and t he current search engines for source code, how far we are from doing questions such as the ones described in my “paper” and others based on requirements, design, and combining other information such as specific metrics.

The time will say it. Source code engines such as B.A.R.T, Merobase, Koders, etc., maybe can show it soon or not.

Software Reuse Business

noreply@blogger.com (Eduardo Almeida) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:21:00 +0000

In 1996, Wayne Lim wrote a paper Evolution of the Software Reuse Business published in the 4th International Conference on Software Reuse (ICSR). In his paper, Wayne discussed the roots of software reuse regarding the business point of view.

Wayne presented the case of the Raytheon and its efforts at the Raytheon Missiles Systems Division dating back to the mid-1970’s. In that time, the company developed a system which included logic structures, an index system, a library, some design specifications and coding standards. Some years after (1981), Raytheon through the Raytheon Computer Services created its reusable system ReadyCode. Next, with this experience they created a company, MasterSoftware, called the world’s first fully reusable software company, as described by Wayne.

Nowadays, we do not have any news about this company even tough Raytheon is still on business. In Wayne’s analysis, the main issue was that their system was success within Raytheon and the market outside the company boundaries is sometimes very different. Wayne highlights the importance of marketing since reuse within a company differs from reuse as an external business. The second point is the life cycle stage of the technology. In that time, reuse was a new way for the market and the need for education and culture was/is too important too.

From that time, we can see many companies on the road and some of them created by the main researchers on the field working in different areas. Examples of companies created from academic researchers include Bayfront Technologies Inc, a company located in California, founded in 1992 by James Neighbors, one of the pioneers in domain analysis. Semantic Designs, Inc, located in Austin, Texas, USA, was founded in 1995 by Dr. Ira Baxter and Dr. Christopher Pidgeon. BigLever Software, Inc is also located in Austin, Texas, being founded in 1999 by Charles Krueger, an important expert in software reuse. Other important researchers also have their companies, such as Bill Frakes, with Software Engineering Guild, Ruben Prieto-Diaz, with Reuse, Inc, Ted Biggerstaff, with www.softwaregenerators.com, and Wayne C. Lim, with the Lombard Hill Group, all of them working with consulting and services related to software reuse.
Not directly associated to academic researchers, the Flashline, Inc. company was a large metadata repository vendor, located in Cleveland, OH, USA. It was purchased in 2006 by BEA Systems, Inc , which incorporated Flashline's repository into its product family. Examples of reuse-dedicated companies from other countries include The Reuse Company, located in Madrid, Spain, with tools for knowledge reuse, and Pure-Systems, founded in 2001 in Germany.

In Brazil, RiSE is also a company offering software reuse solutions based on the C.E.S.A.R and RiSE expertise on the topic.

All of these efforts show that the market is looking for ways to increase the productivity, quality and reduce costs and software reuse is an effective way to achieve it. However, in order to be successful it involves a mix of different and important ingredients.

An Integrated Cost Model for Product Line Engineering

noreply@blogger.com (Eduardo Almeida) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:19:00 +0000

Today, we will publish in this blog one more M.Sc. dissertation defended in our group.

Jarley Nobrega's dissertation presents a relevant contribution for the field defining an economic model for software product lines.

Here is the abstract of the work:

In the software development community, the process of using existing artifacts rather than building them from scratch – generally known as software reuse – has been advanced as a way in which the problems associated with cost and schedule overruns can be avoided. Despite the potential rewards from an effective reuse program, it appears that its large-scale adoption is not particularly prevalent. Among the factors that inhibit reuse adoption there are the economic obstacles faced by organizations, which are concerned with the cost related to develop software for reuse and with reuse. Currently, thedecisions concerning large-scale reuse are often related with an economic viewpoint, since the development of software to be reusable can be considered as an investment. Moreover, the adoption of a software product line in a reuse context comes up with some inhibitors, such as the application of cost models in a restricted way, the lack of an investment analysis strategy, and the fact that a few cost models have a reuse scenario-based approach.

In this context, this work presents an integrated cost model for product line engineering in order to help the decisions concerning reuse investment. The foundations of the model were based on an extensive survey on cost models for software reuse and its extension to the product line approach. The model presents the definition of a set of cost and benefits functions, the description of reuse scenarios for product line engineering, and an investment analysis strategy. In addition, a simulation model based on the Monte Carlo method was proposed for simulating the reuse scenarios.

Finally, this work discusses the results of a case study in the context of a real software development environment where the model was applied.

See the full document here.